Degrees of Success
Rolls in V:TM have different names for different successes in rolls. Feel free to use this chart as a quick reference. 1 Success - Minimal - Whatever you did was eh at best. A punch may feel like a slap. Whatever you fixed will keep going only until someone who is more skilled shows up. It's not a Failure, but it's the bare minimum. 2 Successes - Moderate - Whatever you did was alright. A punch might feel like a strong 'friendly punch' instead of something meaning to hurt. If you fixed something, it's akin to slapping duct tape on it. Ugly, but hey at least it works. 3 Successes - Complete - You did what you set out to do, nothing more, nothing less. Your punch feels like a punch, it hurts but it's not terribly damaging either. Whatever you fixed works, and that's it. If you made something, you did good, not great, but it's there. 4 Successes - Exceptional - You went a bit beyond what was expected. Your punch hurts a bit more than most, leaving a nasty welt, he'll be feeling it for a while. Whatever you fixed has slightly better efficiency, well done. 5 Successes - Phenomenal - Above and beyond the call of duty. You punch can knock a guy flat. Your skills make sure whatever was broke never needs fixing again. Your art is a treasure to behold. 10 Successes - Maximum - Absolutely god like. That guys skull got shattered with you threw a right hook. Your fixing skills are talked about as being better than the pros. Your creations cause genuine emotion to grip those that look upon it. Failure If you score no successes on a die roll, your character fails his attempted action. He misses his punch. Whatever he fixed just doesn't, it's still broken. Your attempt to make something comes out ugly or distasteful. Failure, while usually disappointing, is not so catastrophic as a botch. Botches Bad luck can ruin anything. One more basic rule about rolling dice is the "rule of one," or "botching." Whenever one of the dice comes up as a "1," it cancels out a success. Completely. A botch is much worse than a normal failure - it's outright misfortune. For instance, rolling a botch when trying to gun down a hunter might result in your gun jamming. Botching a Computer roll when hacking into a system will probably alert the authorities, while botching a Stealth roll is the proverbial "stepping on a dry twig." In combat, you even have a chance of harming yourself instead of the opponent. The Storyteller decides exactly what goes wrong; a botch might produce a minor inconvenience or a truly unfortunate mishap. Trying It Again Failure often produces stress, which often leads to further failure. If a character fails an action, he may usually try it again (after all, failing to pick a lock does not mean the character may never try to pick the lock again). In such cases, though, the Storyteller has the option to increase the difficulty number of the second attempt by one. If the attempt is failed yet again, the difficulty of a third attempt goes up by two, and so on. Eventually, the difficulty will be so high that the character has no chance of succeeding (the lock is simply beyond her ability to pick). Sometimes the Storyteller shouldn't invoke this rule. For example, failing to shoot somebody with a gun, detect an ambush, or keep on another driver's tail are to be expected in stressful situations. Such failure does not automatically lead to frustration and failed future attempts. Automatic Success Let's face it - sometimes rolling dice gets tiresome, particularly when your character could perform a given action in his sleep. And anything that streamlines play and reduces distractions is a good thing. Thus, Vampire employs a simple system for automatic successes, allowing you to skip rolling for tasks that your character would find frankly mundane. Simply put, if the number of dice in your dice pool is equal to or greater than the task's difficulty, your character automatically succeeds. No dice roll is necessary. Mind you, this does not work for all tasks, and never works in combat or other stressful situations. Furthermore, an automatic success is considered marginal, just as if you'd gotten only one success on the roll; if quality is an issue, you might want to roll dice anyway to try for more successes. But for simple and often-repeated actions, this system works just fine. There's another way to get an automatic success on a roll: Simply spend a Willpower point. You can do this only once per turn, and since you have a limited supply of Willpower you can't do this too often, but it can certainly help when you're under pressure to succeed. Extended Actions Sometimes you need more than one success to accomplish a task fully. For example, you might have to spend all night tracking down obscure newspaper articles in a library, or climb a cliff face that's impossible to scale in a turn. If you need only one success to accomplish an action, the action in question is called a simple action. But when you need multiple successes to score even a marginal success, you're undertaking an extended action. In an extended action, you roll your dice pool over and over on subsequent turns, trying to collect enough successes to succeed. For example, your character is trying to dig a temporary haven in the forest floor, using only his bare hands. The Storyteller tells you that you need 15 successes to hollow out a den that provides sufficient protection from the sun. You'll eventually succeed, but the longer you go, the more chance there is of you botching and collapsing the tunnel. What's more, if you have only so many turns before dawn, the speed with which you finish your task becomes doubly important. The Storyteller in all cases is the final authority on which tasks are extended actions and which aren't. Common extended actions include hacking, picking a lock, and aiming and firing a sniper rifle. There are two types of extended actions. A total, where you need to accumulate a total number of successes to complete the action. And a success and above, where you need to score a number of successes in a single roll over a given number such as a 2 or 4. Scoring a success and above is a more common extended action roll which can lower a difficulty for following actions. Resisted Actions A simple difficulty number might not be enough to represent a struggle between characters. For instance, you may try to batter down a door while a character on the other side tries to hold it closed. In such a case, you'd make a resisted roll - each of you rolls dice against a difficulty often determined by one of your opponent's Traits, and the person who scores the most successes wins.